At the Waterline: Gentle Readers & Cleaning the Commons Two Novellas

At the Waterline includes two novellas about women the world overlooks. In Gentle Readers, a book club of women across a wide gulf of social status, and the people they know who need housing, live through Milwaukee's housing crisis and the arrival of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. At the center is Jovita, a 32-year-old housecleaner without stable housing, who builds a home-based business and - over roughly three years - buys one of the new affordable prefabricated homes the Act makes possible. In Cleaning the Commons, Maribel cleans plastic waste from the bay in the Philippines while Aya helps clean debris in space. Both of them intersect with Sarah in Washington, who is working on a bill to tax the oil wells.